Cancer developing after an injury

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published Tuesday November 13, 2012 at 6:00 am

Q: Is it possible for cancer to develop as a result of an injury?

A: “It's a common myth that injuries can cause cancer,” the American Cancer Society says on its website. Until the 1920s, some doctors believed trauma did cause cancer, “despite the failure of injury to cause cancer in experimental animals.”

But most medical authorities, including the cancer society and the National Cancer Institute, see no such link.

The more likely explanation, the society suggests, is that a visit to the doctor for an injury could lead to finding an existing cancer.

Other possibilities are that scar tissue from an old trauma could look like a cancerous lesion and that an injured breast or limb would be more closely watched for cancer to develop.

A single interview-based study of breast cancer in England found that 67 women with breast carcinoma were more likely to report physical trauma to the breast in the preceding five years than 134 women in a matched control group without cancer. The study was criticized because of its size and methodology.

The study, published in 2002 in The European Journal of Cancer Prevention, has not been duplicated. Its authors suggested that it was plausible that models of epithelial cell generation could be a mechanism. But the case is far from proved, even for a single type of cancer.